


with this band i bind you

by larkgrace



Category: Chaos Walking - Patrick Ness
Genre: F/M, One of Those Fics after Todd Wakes Up, Romance, don't worry i promise this is mostly a happy fic, i really think that's it as far as warnings go?, mentions of torture, will i ever stop crying over these books??? no i will not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-15
Updated: 2014-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-01 13:44:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2775206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larkgrace/pseuds/larkgrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They’re not married, not in a proper way, she doesn’t think either of them will be able to set foot near a cathedral again, but they share a bed and a home and a life and Viola figures that’s close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.</p><p>“Can I see?” she asks, and Todd nods and places the ring into her palm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with this band i bind you

Viola wonders how anyone can live peacefully with a man that has Noise all the time. Privately, she’s glad she doesn’t. She doesn’t think she could stomach hearing what sets him trembling in the middle of the night, not when she has so many skeletons rattling around in her own closet.

Todd’s Noise is silent when he sleeps and goddamn if it doesn’t nearly give her a heart attack, because he will nod off in the middle of dinner and his Noise will cease and she’ll have to clutch the table until she gets splinters to remind herself that this is not a beach with bloody snow-sand, this is their house and Todd’s near death is nothing more than a scar on his chest and in their minds. He knows how it scares her, makes up for it by never hiding his Noise while waking, not from her nor anyone else. Makes up for it by being as loud as he can be, at least with his Noise. He doesn’t talk to anyone much with his mouth, not since he woke up in Pathway’s End, hasn’t needed to.

He talks to her though. She adores the sound of his voice, scratchy and rusty when his eyes came open staring at the sky and he said “Viola,” first word in five weeks, and then he said, “I’m here.”

His voice had sent Ben rocketing in through the curtain of foliage. Neither of them needed to speak, not with their Noise so wide open, but they mumbled nonsense for hours, father and son with Viola sandwiched between.

\--

He sleeps peacefully more nights than not, these days, but still Viola wakes frequently to him thrashing in the sheets. She doesn’t shake him, doesn’t yell, because he needs to come out of it slow and gentle, so she’ll hold his hands and speak quiet reassurances until he stills and then blinks awake. His Noise always opens before his eyes, reaching out an apology and a thanks.

Viola has quiet nightmares. She doesn’t scream or shake, her muscles lock up and she can’t move even when she wakes sometimes. Todd won’t know she’s been dreaming until he wakes in the morning and sees her eyes gone red and she can feel in his Noise how it hurts him worse than dying.

Most nights, though, they sleep peacefully. Viola dreams about lying on a cloud and touching the stars and doesn’t ask Todd what he dreams ‘cause he’s always going to say something like “Don’t need sweet dreams when I wake up to you,” and sometimes he’s so corny he makes Viola sick. She’s pretty sure he stole that one from a book anyway.

\--

Todd gets home late one evening, his Noise shouting a greeting from the garden gate, saying he was having supper with Ben. Viola figures it’s for the best anyway; the food she made is cold and she’s possibly one of the few people on New World who can make stew inedible.

She opens her own Noise as best she can in return. Hers is weak and scratchy, like radio static, but she’s one of the only women on New World who’s managed to unleash her thoughts and she counts that as a victory. It’s hard for her, though, and she can only manage to convey a little bubble of _glad you’re safe, glad you’re home, I love you_ before her mind snaps shut. She’s better with articulate thoughts and words but she gives feelings whenever she can.

Todd hugs her from behind and buries his nose in her hair. “Hi,” he says, **_I love you, good job, Noise clear as day, I love you_** he says. “What’s that smell?”

“Dinner,” she laments. “Next time you eat over at Ben’s be sure to invite me. He’s a good cook.”

“I’ll be sure to thank him for saving me from yer cooking,” Todd says, and there are no words in his Noise, just laughter.

 ** _Asshole,_** she thinks, loud as she can make it, and his laughter spills over into his voice.

She leaves the mess in the sink for later and he follows her to bed. His Noise is spinning with details of his dinner, the cracked plate and the way he could hear the Noise of Wilf’s sheep from clear down the road when the wind blew right. His Noise spins in a way that lets her know he’s hiding something he doesn’t want to say just yet.

She figures he’ll say whatever’s bothering him when he’s ready and not a moment before—he calls _her_ bullheaded, but really—and she’s too hungry for it to matter now, hungry in a way overcooked stew can’t sate, and she touches his neck _just so_ to let him know. He falls into her touch and brings his gentle calloused hands up to cup her head like it’s the most precious thing in the world, and something scrapes just behind her ear that makes her flinch, and she hears a tiny **_oops_** from Todd.

“What’s this?” she asks, bringing his hand around, and there, left hand ring finger is a metal band, unpolished with rough edges.

“Project I been workin’ on,” Todd says as a flush creeps up his neck.

They’re not married, not in a proper way, she doesn’t think either of them will be able to set foot near a cathedral again, but they share a bed and a home and a life and Viola figures that’s close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades.

“Can I see?” she asks, and Todd nods and slips the ring off his finger to place into her palm.

The band is imperfect and ridged, textured to snag on the whorls of her fingerprints as she turns it round. Fitting, she thinks, at least until she spots the numbers stamped into the metal, _1391_ in a shaky line.

“Todd,” she says. Can’t even open her Noise. Her thoughts are too jumbled to let her.

“Figured, I ever lose it somewhere, nobody else’ll get it mixed up with their own,” he says, and his Noise says, **_my fault, always my fault, now we match, now I’m yours outside and in, too much? Viola,_** and his hands shake and he says “’Course it’s also probably one a the ugliest things on this planet, I’ll make another if ya want,” **_God I’m sorry, Viola, so sorry._**

“Hush,” she says, and he does all the way, Noise snapping shut faster than his mouth. The sudden silence doesn’t make her stomach turn much more than it already is while she drops the ring in her lap and her hand goes up to brush the band on her arm. It’s perfect polished steel so it hasn’t tarnished over the years, still shining just as bright and clear as the day she snapped it on and the blood ran down her arm like a waterfall. The numbers _1391_ are etched in a perfect even line in the exact center of the band. She’s run her fingers over those numbers so many times she could copy them exactly if she was blind, right down to the angle of the serifs on the _1._

She hasn’t regretted her decision, not once, since that day in the healers’ tent. Truthfully doesn’t think about it much, except for when she goes on her trips to Haven five days a week and the young children stare. By the time they’re old enough to sit in on her lectures in Haven’s schoolhouse they’ve learned not to ask about the metal on any of the women’s arms. Doesn’t stop them wondering, especially since everyone and their family dog knows she was in the Answer, **_rebel women hidden camp no bands_** echoing alongside a picture of her face caked with ashes. Asking marks follow in her wake wherever she goes.

Just because she’s used to it, accepted it, doesn’t mean she wants that reminder every time she holds Todd’s hand.

It’s not that the memories bother her much at all—very rarely does she wake shaking from nightmares of infected skin or the sickly sound of her skin being torn apart—because those are hers, her choices and her actions and those she can accept, but seeing her numbers on Todd’s hand makes her think of his fancy uniform with a silver _A_ on the sleeve and screaming at Mistress Coyle, _my Todd would never,_ Coyle’s smug grin, _your Todd has._ She thinks of his hand holding a bolting tool and the terrifying blindness that came over him whenever he so much as glanced at the Mayor. She thinks of losing Todd, of Todd losing himself, of the horrible silence that rolled off of him when the Mayor took his Noise away and called it a blessing.

On Viola the band is a sacrifice, a choice. On Todd it means being enslaved mind and body.

She picks up the ring where she dropped it and deliberately throws it aside, into a dark corner. “Maybe something different,” she tells Todd. “Something just for us.”

“Yeah,” Todd says, his Noise opening tentatively with a soft **_yer such a godforsaken idiot, Hewitt,_** “yeah, that’s a good idea.”

 ** _You’re not an idiot,_** she thinks deliberately while she says, “Maybe this one won’t cut you up so bad,” and raises his hand to kiss his finger where the rough metal rubbed it raw.

 ** _Ow bleeding soft hands Viola thank you,_** he says, “I’m gonna clean that up,” he says.

“And after you do that,” she tells him, stretching her Noise to convey whatever heat doesn’t come across in her gaze, “I can think of a couple of better ways to put your hands to work.”

“Sure,” he says, his face flushing and his Noise turning an eager crimson as he practically sprints for the bathroom. Viola’s laughter follows him the whole way there.

\--

On weekdays, once Viola’s gotten home from teaching her math and science classes in Haven’s schoolhouse, they’ll hold hands and take long rambling walks down the farm road that leads up past the waterfall, past the path that leads to the stone-cut cathedral, past Ben’s farm and the house where Wilf and Jane live and Lee helps them tend sheep, past the house Bradley stays in when he isn’t busy being an ambassador to the Spackle, past the house of a one-armed woman named Jess. Todd doesn’t know Jess, in his Noise her house appears only as **_last house before the falls,_** the last house before the rock overlooking the river where they’ll sit and have picnics on nice nights.

They walk past Jess’s house and Viola squeezes Todd’s arm, and he stops.

“What is it?” he asks.

Viola runs her fingers over the band on his hand, smooth and polished and no markings on it whatsoever.

Viola opens her Noise and thinks hard of a memory she’s never shared with Todd before, one from before she joined the Answer properly. She thinks of Jess, years younger than she looks now, stumbling lost and feverish away from the Office of the Ask (and oh, how Todd flinches at that) with a metal band on the arm she no longer has, a metal band that read _1391._

She thinks of Jess laying on a cot in the healers’ tent, forehead covered in sweat, saying _the other one called him Todd._

“Oh,” Todd moans, _“Viola.”_

“That’s why,” she says quietly. “That’s why I couldn’t let you wear it.”

She looks up and sees Jess standing in one of the upper windows, holding her baby daughter close with her one good arm, and sees Jess give a small, sad smile in Todd’s direction.

Viola hears the scratchy, distant sound of a woman’s Noise saying **_you’re forgiven._**

Todd nods in silent thanks while tears streak down his cheeks.

\--

They take walks in the sunset and visit Wilf and Jane and Lee and Bradley and Jess, and when they eat dinner with Ben he sees the polished band on Todd’s finger and gives a knowing smile.

Bradley meets several times a year with the Sky—with 1017, though lichen’s grown over his band by now, or so Bradley says, since Viola hasn’t seen him since the beach all those years ago. Together they keep the peace. They keep the peace and Wilf and Jane and Lee tend sheep and Ben keeps his door open for any who want a decent meal and Todd farms wheat and Viola teaches science and math.

They work, and life goes on.

That’s just the way of things, Viola thinks, and Todd smiles and rests his head on her shoulder.

**Author's Note:**

> i cry every day about these two, i swear
> 
> anyway i just finished re-reading the ask and the answer and i forgot how much this series wrecked me so i decided to write some happy fic but then all of this goddamn angst got in the way


End file.
